writing binge #2

Well, this is certainly my comeuppance for not following through with the Great Stay Awake All Night and Write of 2010.

We watched Supersize Me this afternoon, a fairly meh documentary when preceded by Food, Inc. The only action it called me to was sending my husband out to McDonald's for nuggets and fries. This is where things went horribly wrong.

You see, Kirk orders meals, which results in a drink for each of us. Except he doesn't drink his pop, he prefers to pair his nuggets with a frosty alcoholic beverage. He is very refined. So we are left with one spare fizzy beverage, always, that I feel inclined to drink.

I put the spare Diet Coke in the fridge for safe keeping, as per usual. But at about 8 p.m. I was a little thirsty and I knew from past experience the extra soda never gets consumed -- it just gets watered down in the fridge, I attempt to drink it in some wild stupor in the morning, spit it out in disgust, and pour the remaining contents down the drain.

Today, I wanted to do things differently. I wanted to actually drink the spare soda, not just let it languish in the fridge under false pretenses, a promise of drinkability later. So at 8, knowing full well I have to get up at 6 tomorrow morning, I set off on an ill-advised Diet Coke drinking journey.

It started off well enough: I finished the first book of Lord of the Rings. I wrote some thank you notes. Then I tried to go to bed and... nada.

Here I am now at 12:30, with the promise of a decent night's sleep desperately slipping away. But I am tallying one point in my favor: I'm writing. My mind is churning. Foggy ideas are being distilled. There's a combined urgency of needing to sleep and needing to wake; the longer I stay up, the more I can read and say.

I wrote an appropriate poem for this situation two years ago. I'm fairly certain the literary mag world will consider this self-publishing and therefore make the poem ineligible for submission, but apparently I'm feeling generous.

dove

Your mourning coo
reminds me of unsleeping
nights, when so suddenly light
seeps in with your song.
You accompany the dew
and with damp feet
I search for the sadness
in the trees.